Vanilla Gradient Descent for Oblique Decision Trees

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Hauptverfasser: Panda, Subrat Prasad, Genest, Blaise, Easwaran, Arvind, Suganthan, Ponnuthurai Nagaratnam
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Panda, Subrat Prasad
Genest, Blaise
Easwaran, Arvind
Suganthan, Ponnuthurai Nagaratnam
author_facet Panda, Subrat Prasad
Genest, Blaise
Easwaran, Arvind
Suganthan, Ponnuthurai Nagaratnam
contents Decision Trees (DTs) constitute one of the major highly non-linear AI models, valued, e.g., for their efficiency on tabular data. Learning accurate DTs is, however, complicated, especially for oblique DTs, and does take a significant training time. Further, DTs suffer from overfitting, e.g., they proverbially "do not generalize" in regression tasks. Recently, some works proposed ways to make (oblique) DTs differentiable. This enables highly efficient gradient-descent algorithms to be used to learn DTs. It also enables generalizing capabilities by learning regressors at the leaves simultaneously with the decisions in the tree. Prior approaches to making DTs differentiable rely either on probabilistic approximations at the tree's internal nodes (soft DTs) or on approximations in gradient computation at the internal node (quantized gradient descent). In this work, we propose DTSemNet, a novel semantically equivalent and invertible encoding for (hard, oblique) DTs as Neural Networks (NNs), that uses standard vanilla gradient descent. Experiments across various classification and regression benchmarks show that oblique DTs learned using DTSemNet are more accurate than oblique DTs of similar size learned using state-of-the-art techniques. Further, DT training time is significantly reduced. We also experimentally demonstrate that DTSemNet can learn DT policies as efficiently as NN policies in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) setup with physical inputs (dimensions $\leq32$). The code is available at https://github.com/CPS-research-group/dtsemnet.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_09135
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Vanilla Gradient Descent for Oblique Decision Trees
Panda, Subrat Prasad
Genest, Blaise
Easwaran, Arvind
Suganthan, Ponnuthurai Nagaratnam
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Decision Trees (DTs) constitute one of the major highly non-linear AI models, valued, e.g., for their efficiency on tabular data. Learning accurate DTs is, however, complicated, especially for oblique DTs, and does take a significant training time. Further, DTs suffer from overfitting, e.g., they proverbially "do not generalize" in regression tasks. Recently, some works proposed ways to make (oblique) DTs differentiable. This enables highly efficient gradient-descent algorithms to be used to learn DTs. It also enables generalizing capabilities by learning regressors at the leaves simultaneously with the decisions in the tree. Prior approaches to making DTs differentiable rely either on probabilistic approximations at the tree's internal nodes (soft DTs) or on approximations in gradient computation at the internal node (quantized gradient descent). In this work, we propose DTSemNet, a novel semantically equivalent and invertible encoding for (hard, oblique) DTs as Neural Networks (NNs), that uses standard vanilla gradient descent. Experiments across various classification and regression benchmarks show that oblique DTs learned using DTSemNet are more accurate than oblique DTs of similar size learned using state-of-the-art techniques. Further, DT training time is significantly reduced. We also experimentally demonstrate that DTSemNet can learn DT policies as efficiently as NN policies in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) setup with physical inputs (dimensions $\leq32$). The code is available at https://github.com/CPS-research-group/dtsemnet.
title Vanilla Gradient Descent for Oblique Decision Trees
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09135